On gun shooting and gun ownership

First off, condolence to the families of people shot and murdered in El Paso, Texas (20 dead) and Dayton, Ohio (9 dead) today. Tragic indeed.

On prohibiting gun ownership to civilians to "stop gun shooting", I support the position taken by a friend, Willis Eschenbach, posted in his fb wall today. Reposting below. The meme here, CTTO.
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I've been thinking about the tragedy of the shooting in Texas, and the fact that as a result, people once again are screaming for more gun laws.

It's funny. I grew up on a cattle ranch. When I was a kid, every boy I knew got a rifle when they were 12. My older brother. Me. Kids on other cattle ranches.

And during deer hunting season, something like a quarter of the pickup trucks in our high school parking lot had a rifle in the gun rack. It was not uncommon to see a deer on the way to or from school, and kids wanted to be prepared.

And you know what?

Nobody ever shot anyone at our school.

We had lots of guns, including semi-automatic rifles, available any time during school hours for the entire deer season.

So please, don't try to tell me that the problem is the availability of guns. We had lots of semi-automatic rifles in our high school parking lot, what they now falsely call "assault weapons" although they are nothing of the sort.

We had ammunition, both in the guns and in the glove boxes of most of the trucks.

And nobody got shot.

The problem is not the availability of guns.

The problem is the people. And sadly, tragically, all the gun laws in the world won't cure that.

California has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation. Despite that, some lunatic shot up the Gilroy Garlic Festival last week. Here's how.

He used an illegal gun, with an illegal magazine. He illegally broke into the festival, illegally took his gun into a gun-free zone, and illegally murdered some folks ...

... does anyone truly think that more gun laws would have stopped him? Every single thing he did was illegal—you can tell how much laws of any kind meant to him. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Assuredly this is not an easy problem to solve, but focusing on the guns and the gun laws is a guaranteed way to NOT solve it ... as we used to say in the sixties, "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns".

Best regards to you all, hug those you love, life is most uncertain and tomorrow is not guaranteed.

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On October 25, 2015, I posted this, On Liberalizing Gun Ownership.

I argued there,

I believe that gun ownership should be liberalized with only one condition -- people should belong to a gun club, a private, civil society organization, that in turn is registered with the government.

The club will provide training and teach responsibility to members.. The club and its officers will assume some accountability if one or some of their members will abuse their gun ownership. Self-policing of members is a must. So when a club member harms or murders another person somewhere, the guys who will primarily haunt him will be his clubmates, not the police. The clubmates know where he lives, works, hangs out often, his other close friends, and so on….